Robert Peston: ‘Impartial journalism is not giving equal airtime to two people one of whom says the world is flat and the other one says the world is round.’
Photograph: ITV/PA

ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston, has accused the BBC of being confused about the nature of impartial journalism when it was covering the EU referendum campaign.

Peston spent nine years at the BBC as business editor and economics editor before becoming political editor of ITV where, he told the Cheltenham literature festival, he consistently said on air that the UK economy would be worse off under Brexit.

He was asked whether the BBC could be blamed for Brexit. He laughed at the suggestion but went on to criticise its coverage. “The problem with the BBC, during the campaign, it put people on with diametrically opposed views and didn’t give their viewers and listeners any help in assessing which one was the loony and which one was the genius,” he said.

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“I do think that they went through a period of just not being confident enough. Impartial journalism is not giving equal airtime to two people one of whom says the world is flat and the other one says the world is round. That is not balanced, impartial journalism.”

Peston said he considered the fact that the Vote Leave campaign made a formal complaint to Ofcom and instructed its lawyers “to get him off air” because they did not like what he regarded as proper, impartial journalism as a badge of honour. The complaint was dismissed.

He said impartial journalism was about “weighing the evidence and saying on the balance of probabilities … this is the truth. It is the role of a journalist to say, ‘we’ve got these two contradictory arguments, I’m now going to advise all of you which is likely to be closer to the truth.’”

Peston said he consistently said on ITV News that leaving the EU would make the UK poorer. “Not massively poorer. I thought the Project Fear bit of the government’s campaign was overdone. But poorer.”

He also said Theresa May’s decision to name 29 March 2019 as the date for leaving the European Union was a huge mistake, because it gave the EU all the bargaining power. “I regard that decision as one of the most costly decisions a prime minister has made this century,” he said.

Peston used to think there was only a tiny probability of there being a second referendum. He now thought there was about a 40-50% chance. He said a second vote would bring huge dangers because it might not, again, be decisive. It could lead to the rise of “anti-democratic extremists”, he said.

“My biggest fear at the moment is that millions of people would simply take the view that our parliamentary democracy doesn’t work,” he said.